Part 15 (1/2)
Just a quarter mile to the south lay the wharves of Boston, with Admiral Graves's fleet of wars.h.i.+ps anch.o.r.ed in the waters in between and, even more menacing, the mammoth cannons of the Copp's Hill battery pointed in their direction. To place a fort overlooking Charlestown on Breed's Hill-right in the figurative face of the British-was an entirely different undertaking than had been ordered by the Committee of Safety. Instead of a defensive position, this was an unmistakable act of defiance. A fort built here, especially one equipped with provincial cannons that could rake British s.h.i.+pping and the Boston waterfront, invited a forceful response from the British army. Given the provincials' almost nonexistent reserves of gunpowder, this was not what the Committee of Safety had in mind. But this was where Prescott, Putnam, and Gridley began to build the fort.
We will never know exactly why they arrived at this decision. According to the only account we have of what transpired among the three officers that night, Gridley, the engineer, and one of the other officers wanted to begin by fortifying Bunker Hill, but ”on the pressing importunity” of the third officer, they started with Breed's Hill instead. Given Putnam's aggressive personality-he was the one, after all, who led the brazen march down to the Charlestown waterfront back in May-many have a.s.sumed that he browbeat the others into disregarding Ward's orders and building the fort in a place that General Gage could not ignore. But as the events of the following day revealed, Prescott was just as forceful, if not more so, than Putnam, who appears to have been there only as a volunteer. No matter whose idea it was, Prescott was in charge of the operation and was therefore the one who a.s.sumed ultimate responsibility for the location of the fort. In the day to come he would fight with a ruthless, often inspiring ferocity, but that did not change the fact that dysfunction came to define a battle that was ultimately named-perhaps appropriately, given its befuddled beginnings-for the wrong hill. As John Pitts later wrote to Samuel Adams, ”Never was more confusion and less command.”
And so they began. Around midnight, with only four hours between them and the approach of morning, Gridley began to sketch out the contours of a quadrangular fort on Breed's Hill. In addition to pickaxes and shovels, the men had been provided with fascines (cylindrical bundles of brushwood), gabions (cages filled with rocks or soil), and empty barrels that were used to build the fort's earthen walls, the two longest of which stretched approximately 132 feet and met to form a west-facing V. A ditch surrounded the roofless, fully enclosed fort, known technically as a redoubt, which could be accessed from the rear, east-facing wall by what was called a sally port.
The redoubt (which means, ironically enough, ”place of retreat”) was about as simple a structure as could be designed but still required hours of backbreaking labor to build. They wanted their efforts to remain a secret for as long as possible. Unfortunately, only a few hundred yards away were several men-of-war, floating cities of sailors whose watches stood on the decks gazing across the warm, unruffled harbor. The absence of wind meant that the sounds of shovels and pickaxes banging against rocks and pebbles echoed unimpeded across the dark emptiness toward Boston. Fearful that they were about to be discovered, Prescott sent a group of sixty men, which included that devout veteran of the Battle of Chelsea Creek, Amos Farnsworth, down into the empty village of Charlestown to act as sentinels. Those who were not patrolling the waterfront were told to wait in the town house and, Farnsworth recorded, ”not to shut our eyes.” Prescott's concern was so great that he descended the hill several times that night to make sure they were still undetected. He later told his son about how relieved he felt when he heard the watch aboard the sloop-of-war Lively report, ”All's well.”
As it turned out, they were detected. General Henry Clinton, living in John Hanc.o.c.k's house on Beacon Hill, was having trouble sleeping that night. So he went for a walk along the northern margins of Boston and quickly realized that something was going on in the direction of Charlestown. He could hear it-the unmistakable sounds of digging. He stood either on a wharf or, more likely, on a well-positioned hill and stared into the darkness through his spygla.s.s. Sure enough, he ”saw them at work.”
He rushed to Province House and awakened Thomas Gage. In an early-morning meeting with Gage and Howe, Clinton urged ”a landing in two divisions at day break.” Howe appeared to think it was a good idea, but as he so often did when presented with a plan for immediate action, Gage demurred. They would wait to see what the light of day revealed.
It came gradually-the brightening of the sky in the east toward the islands of Boston Harbor, the fading of the stars overhead into a gray, increasingly bluish sky, and then the sudden realization that they were digging a fortification that might very well become their collective grave. When the provincial soldiers paused to look around, they could now see that instead of being set back on the distant height of Bunker Hill, they were here, on the little knoll of Breed's Hill, overlooking Charlestown. Peter Brown of Westford, Ma.s.sachusetts, was appalled. He estimated that they were surrounded by eight cannon-equipped s.h.i.+ps, along with ”all Boston fortified against us.” ”The danger we were in,” he wrote to his mother in Newport, Rhode Island, ”made us think ... that we were brought there to be all slain, and I must and will venture to say that there was treachery, oversight, or presumption in the conduct of our officers.”
In front of them was Charlestown, tucked into the side of the hill and the harbor. To the east was the sweep of an easy slope that ran down to a thirty-five-foot sh.o.r.eside b.u.mp known as Morton's Hill. There were some fences, some swampy ground, and the clay pits of a brick kiln, but nothing of any substance to prevent an army of regulars from landing at the tip of the peninsula and attacking from their unprotected left. Here they were-all by themselves, already exhausted and sleep-deprived, with no one to support them.
Just as this terrifying realization began to settle in, they saw a bud of flame erupt from the side of one of those nearby wars.h.i.+ps, followed by a soul-shattering roar and the hissing smack of a cannonball as it buried itself in the dirt. It was the sloop-of-war Lively, and soon enough, another cannonball was flying through the air in their direction. It was mesmerizing, the way you could see the black dot arc lazily through the cloudless sky, all the while knowing that it was going to land somewhere near where you were standing. The officers a.s.sured the men that while the cannons made plenty of noise, they were, in actuality, surprisingly ineffective when it came to killing soldiers. It was time to get back to work and finish the fort.
On the third, perhaps the fourth, shot one of those black dots proved the officers wrong. Thirty-five-year-old Asa Pollard of Billerica was working in front of the redoubt when a four-inch-diameter cannonball weighing nine pounds divided his head from the rest of his body. This was more than many of these young recruits could stand. They asked Colonel Prescott what they should do with their friend's headless corpse. A minister offered to say a few words before Pollard was committed into the ground, but Prescott insisted that he be buried immediately and that they continue to work on the fort. The minister seems to have succeeded in conducting an impromptu service, but it was Prescott who soon had his men's attention.
He leaped onto the parapet of the redoubt, and as cannonb.a.l.l.s continued to sizzle through the air, he urged the men on. He had a three-cornered hat on his head, and ”strutting backward and forward” with a long evening coat (known as a banyan) swirling about him like a colorful cape, he pulled the hat off his head and, waving it in the air, shouted at the British wars.h.i.+ps below them, ”Hit me if you can.” It was a most inspiring display of courage, and yet what one veteran later remembered was how all the hat-waving had somehow displaced Prescott's pigtail so that ”it hung over his right shoulder, giving him a quite ludicrous appearance.”
Prescott had fought with such distinction during the French and Indian War that he had been offered a commission in the British army-an offer he was quite happy to refuse. An anger smoldered inside Prescott, who appears to have had no patience with Israel Putnam's nostalgic fondness for the British officers with whom he had fought in Canada. A few months earlier, his brother-in-law Abijah Willard, a loyalist, had warned him ”that his life and estate would be forfeited for treason” if he took up arms against Britain. ”I have made up my mind on that subject,” Prescott replied, ”I think it probable I may be found in arms, but I will never be taken alive.”
Prescott could see that they were dreadfully open to attack on the left. They needed to build an earthen wall that ran more than 150 feet to the east, where it would connect with a virtually impa.s.sable swamp. If men were posted behind that wall, the British would have a much harder time surrounding them.
By this point, Gridley, the engineer, had, in Prescott's words, ”forsook me.” A brief lull in the firing from the Lively gave Prescott the chance to draw out the dimensions of the wall in the dirt, and soon his men were at it once again-digging a deep ditch and piling up the dirt into what came to be known as ”the breastwork.”
But as the cannon fire resumed and the sun climbed in the sky and exhaustion and thirst began to erode what little enthusiasm Prescott had been able to muster, the men started to wonder once again about what they'd gotten themselves into. In addition to artillery fire from the Lively and the other men-of-war, the battery on Copp's Hill, less than a mile away and with cannons that fired b.a.l.l.s that, at twenty-five pounds, were more than twice as heavy as those from the Lively, now had its big guns trained on Prescott's redoubt. ”Some of our country people [started to] desert,” Peter Brown wrote, ”apprehending the danger in a clearer manner than the rest, who were more diligent in digging and fortifying ourselves against the [enemy]. We began to be almost beat out, being tired by our labor and having no sleep the night before, but little victuals, no drink but rum.”
Some of Prescott's officers insisted that it was time to request reinforcements. After building the fort, these men could not be expected to defend it. They must send a messenger to General Ward in Cambridge. But Prescott was adamant. They were the ones who had built these walls, ”and they should have the honor of defending them.” No reinforcements were necessary.
There may have been more than a little defensiveness in Prescott's refusal to seek aid. If they had been where they were supposed to be-on Bunker Hill-there would have been no need for reinforcements. They would have been beyond the effective range of the British battery. They would have also been much closer to the relative safety of Cambridge. There would have been none of this drama and angst-just a lot of digging. That was why General Ward had made no apparent preparations for a possible battle on June 17. But Prescott had changed everything. Whether it was a result of, as Private Peter Brown wrote, ”treachery, oversight, or presumption,” Prescott had stirred up a hornet's nest by building this lonely redoubt, and he was reluctant to admit that he now needed help.
Finally it was decided; they must seek a.s.sistance. But there was a problem. No one had a horse. And so, just after 9:00 a.m., Major John Brooks, a twenty-three-year-old doctor from Medford, began the three-and-a-half-mile walk to Cambridge.
By that time the British had a plan. Soon after daybreak, Gage had conducted a meeting with Clinton, Howe, and Burgoyne in Province House to discuss the best way to deal with the new patriot fort. Clinton was for mounting a two-p.r.o.nged attack. While Howe led a frontal a.s.sault against the redoubt, he would venture up the Mystic River by boat with five hundred regulars, and after landing at Charlestown Neck, attack from the rear. If Gage had agreed to this plan, Clinton would have, a fellow officer later claimed, ”shut them up in the peninsula as in a bag... . They must have surrendered instantly or been blown to pieces.” But as Gage pointed out, this would have placed Clinton in an exceedingly risky position. All it would take was a provincial a.s.sault from Cambridge to trap him and his small force between two armies.
Howe had what Gage considered to be a far less risky plan. As they could all plainly see, the redoubt was almost totally exposed to an a.s.sault from the American left. By capitalizing on this glaring vulnerability, Howe proposed to envelop the redoubt and attack it from several sides simultaneously. With the exception of Clinton (who lamented that ”my advice was not attended to”), the other officers agreed that Howe's plan was a sound one.
Before it could be put in place, the regulars had to be a.s.sembled at Long Wharf and the North Battery for transportation across the harbor to Morton's Point on the eastern tip of the peninsula. With high tide scheduled for around three in the afternoon, they would aim to coordinate the a.s.sault with the tide.
At some point that morning, Howe met with Admiral Graves. It was essential that the s.h.i.+ps' cannons provide the troops with an effective covering fire; they also wanted to be sure to pound the redoubt as unmercifully as possible, even as they did everything in their power to prevent provincial reinforcements from crossing the Neck onto the Charlestown peninsula. Graves's largest vessels, the Boyne and Somerset, could not elevate their guns high enough to fire on the heights of Breed's Hill, and they were too big to approach Charlestown Neck. This left the Lively, whose guns had begun the fighting, the Glasgow, the Symmetry, and the much smaller Falcon and Spitfire, which were all positioned around the southern and western sides of the peninsula. The causeway of a milldam provided a barrier to the vessels approaching the Neck from the Charles River, but with the aid of two raftlike gondolas, each equipped with a twelve-pound cannon, they should be able to make the Neck a very hot place for any provincial reinforcements.
Gage would spend most of the day in Province House, but that morning he ventured out to inspect the American fort for himself. With the help of his spygla.s.s he could see a man standing on the parapet of the redoubt, about a thousand yards away as the cannonball flies. Beside Gage was the loyalist Abijah Willard. Handing Willard his telescope, Gage asked if could recognize the man standing so promiscuously on the fort. The distance was probably too great to see his face, but the banyan may have tipped Willard off. By G.o.d, it was his brother-in-law, William Prescott.
”Will he fight?” Gage asked.